Jonah Goldberg (Last year: Number 7.)

In March Jonah Goldberg literally wrote “meh” instead of rebutting an argument, in his nationally syndicated political column.

Thomas Friedman (Last year: Number 3.)

Thomas Friedman continued to, domestically, demand a centrist third party that acted exactly like our current centrist Democratic party. But his best work, as always, concerned foreign lands. What other columnist would have the balls to go to the scene of a popular revolution and “quote” a native pleading with the wise American columnist to explain what he thinks is going on in her country?

Marty Peretz (Last year: Number 5.)

Poor Marty lost his New Republic blog and “editor” title, but the magazine still lets him go on at length about middle eastern affairs, despite his lengthy and well-documented history of being an unrepentant anti-Arab racist.

George Will (Last year: Number 11.)

Will got an early start on his traditional election year conflict of interest, trashing Romney and Gingrich on television and in print before being forced to disclose that his wife is a paid Rick Perry advisor. Also, he’s still lying all the time about climate change.

Marc Thiessen (Last year: Number 6.)

The lying torture-defender still has a Post column, and even got to ask questions at a presidential debate! It’s not as morally repulsive as his other work, but the single silliest thing he wrote this year was this bit claiming that “Occupy Wall Street” was to blame for the inevitable failure of the supercommittee.

Bill Kristol (Last year: Number 17.)

Kristol’s Weekly Standard belatedly and bizarrely hopped on the Gingrich bandwagon as the year drew to a close. And why not? Kristol wouldn’t be Kristol if he didn’t endorse and prop up toxic, unelectable Republicans.

Mickey Kaus Number 25.)

The inventor of annoying political blogging moved his blog to the Daily Caller, where I assume he is still complaining about immigrants. His hackiest moment: I’ll say, picking more or less at random, this post, expressing dismay that Arizona nutcase politician Russell Pearce was recalled, because it sent the message that Arizona voters may be going soft on fanatical hatred of immigrants.

Tucker Carlson (Last year: Number 22.)

Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller news site is as inessential as ever. His hackiest moment of the year: Hiring a professional Berman and Company liar to edit the Caller, then printing a rather blatantly untrue story about the EPA.

Tina Brown (Last year: Number 18.)

Tina may be working incredibly hard at salvaging a dying newsweekly, with a clueless boss holding the purse strings, but on the other hand, that Princess Di fanfic cover was unacceptable. (Her actual hackiest moment, though, might be doing a phone interview and a conference call from the Acela’s quiet car.)

Krugman, in a column published three days later, wrote:

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

Hah, I wonder who those “pundits” are, don’t you? He went on:

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Oh, those usual suspects!

In today’s New York Times, Krugman’s column on the doomed supercommittee contains what I would characterize as a slightly off-topic tangent:

Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to “centrist” pundits who won’t admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?” Mr. Obama: “I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.” Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?”

You see, admitting that one side is willing to make concessions, while the other isn’t, would tarnish one’s centrist credentials. And the result is that the G.O.P. pays no price for refusing to give an inch.

These so-called “centrist” pundits sound pretty dumb, right? Here’s New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, earlier this week:

Here we are in America again on the eve of a major budgetary decision by yet another bipartisan “supercommittee,” and does anyone know what President Obama’s preferred outcome is? Exactly which taxes does he want raised, and which spending does he want cut? The president’s politics on this issue seems to be a bowl of poll-tested mush.

How funny, this sounds a lot like what Paul Krugman’s unnamed idiot “centrist” pundit keeps saying.

To my knowledge, no one bothers to do this with Maureen Dowd columns, because she rarely makes arguments worth engaging with.

[Second example via Weigel]